Dear Friends, Every year we take the Coming of Age class on a pilgrimage. We call it ‘the Boston trip.’

Dear Friends, Sue Magidson has completed her course work and will graduate from Starr King, our West Coast UU seminary, named in honor of UU minister, Thomas Starr King – during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln credited King with preventing California from becoming a separate republic.

Dear Friends, A colleague and I were talking about our early years in ministry and I said, “When I was starting ministry at age 29 I had the sense that I was too young to have credibility. Plato said to be a philosopher you had to be 50, so I remember wanting to be 50.”

Dear Friends, I remember an old story about a 10-year-old boy who went into a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. A waitress put a glass of water in front of him. The boy asked, “How much is an ice cream sundae?” The waitress replied, “Fifty cents.”  ( It is an old story!)

Dear Friends, In his poem A Song For Occupations Whitman declares: All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it, (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

Dear Friends, I’m feeling like the winner of an Oscar, standing at the microphone and looking out at family and friends who should be thanked, but lost for words in a whirlwind of emotion.

Dear Friends, My dear friend Gus Pearson died last week at age 94. When I learned of Gus’s death the first thing that came to my mind was ‘a rare and beautiful species has gone extinct.’ Gus was, first and foremost, one of a kind.  He was a rare bird!

Dear Friends, Words often get twisted around. For example, contrary to popular notion, Will Rogers did not say, “I never met a man I didn’t like.”  He said that his epitaph should read, “I joked about every prominent man in my lifetime, but I never met one I didn’t like.” There’s a big difference.

Dear Friends, We mark our lives on the calendar with anniversaries – day of birth, weddings, graduations, ordination, the deaths of loved ones. It helps us to remember, to be re-minded, to re-visit.

Dear Friends, An earthquake is ‘a sudden movement of the earth’s crust caused by the release of stress accumulated along geologic faults or by volcanic activity. It’s also called a tremor.’ It’s a natural disaster – not a decision made by some supernatural deity.